Info-matic (not especially funny)

A week or so ago, I had a very informative day. I learned about a kind of grass that emits a protein that makes the balls of a kind of vole bigger. This in turn makes more voles, which eat a kind of shrew that eats the grass. The grass lives and the voles have big ol' balls, everybody wins (except for the shrew). Evolution is so neat, and proves its neatness every day. Something that astounds me all the time is the denial people have for evolution, and their one-dimensional perspective when it comes to how things came to be.

When I was a kid ( so many of my paragraphs start out like that), we used to get books from Klutz press that were centered around having fun as a kid. They had great ideas on how to piss off adults and play childish pranks, and do crafts and magic tricks and all kinds of great kid stuff. They put out science books too, because science is really fascinating and kids should be allowed to realize this. Such a science book by Klutz was called Explorabook, which had a page on evolution. It briefly explained things using a picture of a monkey and a picture of Tom Cruise (har), but my dad wrote on it:

"Note: this page is not true. Love, Dad"

I know why he did it, but it wasn't a good fight to have gotten himself into. Most kids have an easier time with evolution because it's just really cool, while biblical origins of the universe are wordy, boring, and full of rules and dialogue. I myself don't like listening to speeches about how fucked I am for being who I am and thinking what I think , so I don't think kids are going to be much better at it than I am.

Another thing I learned about on the radio that same day I spoke of was religious extremism. There was an interview with a guy who had spoken with suicide bombers who had failed at their missions for various reasons. He described one man in special detail since he had been really affected by him. He said the guy was almost sociopathic, and was completely detached from everything. He was so immersed in religion and so ready for the next world that he "was already dead."

Having given up on planet Earth, he was going to kill as many people as he could and go home to his 777 virgins in the sky. This disturbed me, that a person could remove himself from reality like that, and have his frame of thought be in a place completely unlike a normal person's. It was like the last day of school for him before summer break, and all he had to do to go home and play in the sprinkler was to kill the class hampster and run out the door. His imaginary way out was so real that he operated under a different dimension's parameters while still here.

I then thought about how I knew people who were in a similar frame of mind, but who were obviously far less militant. Sure, the above person's situation is not normal, but his kind of judgements are quite near those of people I've known. These people have saturated their consciousness with religion or other dogma so deeply that they do not have but the last remnants of a personality. They have a glazed over look in their eyes as if high, a far off expression in front of a mind taken away to the afterlife. They're the zombie kids on TBN and the ones celebrated in Jack Chick comics. They have nothing much interesting to say because they don't think on their own at all anymore. These people who are "already dead" no longer belong on the planet and want to go to their own some place else. I'd wave them goodbye if I could because I feel at home here.

It takes a certain kind of person to achieve this, a certain kind of blind, naiive passiveness. They are not only the same kinds of minds that can become suicide bombers, but also the same kind that join cults or PETA or sit at home scared by whatever Rush Limbaugh tells them to be scared of. Maybe they need to be sheepish and be told what to do, but since they're so immersed they are far more impressionable and this can turn in a very bad direction given the wrong circumstances.

I make no generalizations with this, saying faith is entirely bad, which it is not. It is really, really important in the best of ways for a shit ton of people. I have friends who would be bad places if it were not for their faith. What I am saying is there are people who are so emotionally and mentally vulnerable that faith is just a bad idea. They turn into suicide bombers and make their kids into suicide bombers to follow right after them. Islamic extremism is, in itself, an evolved form of religious extremism that Christianity has not encountered. To me, there is not a lot of difference between these two sons of Abraham, just that the guns, germs, steel and time have turned one into the radical bullet party that it is now considered to be. As a consequence, the normal people who need and use faith and who try to exhibit the principles of it are left to take the brunt of the criticism since they're the only ones who haven't strapped C4 to themselves yet.



On that same informative day, there was a show about a guy who was being recorded helping his Grandpa out on his 100th birthday. In the scene recorded, he's helping the old man get dressed:

Man:"Hey, Grandpa, you got your jacket? It's right there. Looking good."
Man's Grandpa: "GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE, GODAMMIT! GO, GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!"